Diary of a Furry and Would-Be-Werefox Sufferer, Entry One
First of all, my name is Anthony Lutz, and I'm writing this for two reasons:
One because I can't sleep... the terrible allergy that I suffer has stricken my skin with all kinds of myriad tingles, every hair becoming like a live ant, biting into my skin with venom--formic acid, to be exact. Second, because it's a confusing subject that is largely fetiishistic, and I want to relate it to a larger, mainstream audience, so they might understand my strange predicament better.
I'm a twenty-four year old American boy who has not done well for himself in the first quarter of his life. As young as I can remember dealing with other people, I was dealing with myself being different, and struggling under the weight that always entails for young people.
The first dream that I can remember was about my family being skunk people, and I, young as I was, meeting a skunk girl named Julia, who became my dream sweetheart--for that brief, short stint of sleep. Something about that dream lingered with me, even though I had no former predilection to the idea of anthropomorphy being beautiful... but from that point on, I wanted to change into something different.
Something beastly, and yet, a person.
My childhood period was unremarkable, but maintained a sharp and ringing sensation of satisfaction, from act to act, in contrast to my recent years. I had a best friend and neighbor, black, and from a fairly religious family--Teddy. We played a lot outside, imagining ourselves all sorts of video game characters. We played Sonic the Hedgehog a lot--then games like Starfox, Zelda, and Mischief Makers when the N64 game console became popular. Of course, moments in his house were brief, so the need to enact our game-time adventures in the backyards of the neighborhood was made manifest quite often. I once remember taping together two rollerblading kneepads over my right hand, and pretending to be Megaman, along with Teddy and his brother Tarik.
Despite the brightness of this scene, it was overcast by an inevitable shadow--school. I was entered into a Private Christian School, TCS, in Ottawa, Ohio, around the age of six. There, I dealt with new youngsters. Many. Sadly, most of them picked up on a difference in me, that I had not until then taken account of--I had a tendency to dream, and to make my dreams vocal. Sound effects, adventures, games, imagination in general became a target for mockery by my equally young peers. Nasty jokes circulated on the school bus amidst whispers, and I could never tell who was making friendly conversation, and who was setting something up at my expense.
Eventually, I gained my first label. Attention Defecit. That's what the stuffed shirts called me--the nurse, Nancy, in her white gown with her ugly lips and predilection to what I like to call "No Empathy Whatsoever", along with the superintendant, his wife the music teacher, and the pig-loving replacement principal, Gagle, among a myriad of other jerks and hacks at psychology.
I'll be subjective. In my belief, my mother is a terrible judge of character, and will listen to people with strong dogma and a bit of commonality with her, so long as they are female and/or with children of their own. Naturally, I being as I was a very young boy, had little insight or opinion of my own on such scientific assertations--I just took what was said by Adults for given. A regimine of Ritalin and Adderal proceded in the years to come.
Insomnia was with me a lot through my young teen years. I remember listening to Kenny G a lot in the nights while lying on a flat, flat mattress, and thinking about wolves. It crept up on me--wanting this change. I couldn't sleep, so my recourse was to dream while awake--of standing on all fours, changing into a wolf. Sometimes I would wet my bed a little, or the floor--or crap in my pants, dreaming that the stretching was instead coming from a growing tail. I had not discovered sexuality at this point, but I think this was as close to the conception of such a thing as any.
As any fantasy, I know that these dreams took root in stories and animations I had witnessed--and many like me will cite the same. However, what drove me to desire to shed my humanity was a sense of... unbelonging. I was an outsider who thought different, suffered restless nights, and took pleasure in the sole, simple thought of change. The desire to feel physical stretching, pushing, growth. I'm sure someone like Freud--or perhaps his better since he is cynically regarded in the psychological field--could chart a natural, base origin from this strange development--perhaps the desire to suckle, or phallic symbolism of tails, or whatnot--but this is simply speculation on my part.
All I can say is that, at the age of eleven, the concept of man infused with the traits of an animal, and physically forced to purge himself of his human shape, the way one would alleviate their bowels, through a literal forcing of the human from the body by extension and contraction--of lengthy and detailed, both voluntary and involuntary metamorphosis--came about in me.
At first, the exact creature whose fixation I carried with me varied, ebbed and flowed in seasons. The wolf, of course, is the easiest target to pin down--werewolves are a common and overused staple of fiction--but I even admitted more distant creatures such as centaurs and mermaids as interesting and tangible to my fixation, at first. An entire year I spent at three seperate libraries in the vicinity of Toledo, simply looking for books on change, and transformation of humans, into something more beastly. I hid it tight in my heart, away from my family, my friends, and my teachers.
Only "God", that pompous, silent, stoic braggart, as it were--held audience to my desire. I'd bombard that blowhard on a daily basis. "God, let me be a wolf." Or "God, let me understand how the wolf thinks." As the silence continued, and the years stacked on, the thoughts deepened in severity. "God, let me be among creatures who do not hate." "God, why do you allow this desire in me, yet you leave me unfilled." "God, please let me earn a place, and stop being human."
And finally... "God, if you aren't listening, I don't begrudge you, but let me stop suffering."
And then I realized, that either I was just stupid and missing something, or fooling myself into believing "God" cared, if he wasn't laughing and planning my condemnation. Oh yes, for a time, that ripe and furious age of young highschoolers, I was brimming with angst and fire for "God" and his seeming indifference. I especially hated rednecks. Hicks--the bible belt type. In fact, what I hated most was Americans, for displacing the native people of the country. Loosely, but not for entirely unjustified reasons... I slowly began to gravitate toward animism and coexistance with animals as nobler ideologies than righteousness and salvation.
In fact, more than that, I began to despise God, because I knew in the pit of my stomach, that he and people who respected him looked on me as unrighteous, unpure--perverse, even--as I began to understand the meaning of desire, and the stigma Judeo-Christian religions holds toward it.
I looked at her a lot back then--her name is Lupe, and she's a character from an Archie comic--Sonic the Hedgehog. She's a wolf woman, in the story, who leads a pack. Tight lingerie adorned her form, and she bore a braided tail, thick violet fur, and a ponytail and mohawk. As vapid as the story may or may not have been, just her looks were gorgeous to me at sixteen--and I kept the cover of the comic book depicting her long after it had frayed and tattered, torn loose from its staples--for over two years, in fact. I remember, I loved her claws, her fangs, her muzzle. I didn't know what a rhinarium was then, but something about her nose--that wet pad, was incredibly sexy, to me.
I didn't like the hooked curve and hairy nostrils of humans, nor the round face and the way the upper lip and chin formed a crescent moon in profile--at least, on my own face. Yet, adding the looks of an otherwise unsexy creature--a canine, to a human woman's frame--created a fantastic, inscrutable diva. There was a period of time where I found nothing attractive to me--no girl, no boy--only animal women, in art. I wanted to join them, to sport canine looks of my own. I never was able to draw in my mind a constant picture of myself--neither as I am, nor as I would wish to be--but from then on, I frequently enacted fantasies in my mind--of humans turning, changing into such creatures. Sometimes it was against their will, shocking, tear-wrenching change--and sometimes it was welcomed, yearned for--a blessing from some primordial entity. Regardless, it was always arousing for me.
At some point during this transition, amidst sexual maturation, masturbation, and angst--I got introduced to the Therianthropy subculture on the internet. That is to say--the ass end of what was already the ass end of human society. I will bruise egos for what some people will probably rant for hours about--but suffice to say, here were people who wanted so badly to believe in something, that they started pretending to be werewolves--that they would simply call themselves wolves, pushing aside rationale, was at that time, a light in the darkness, for me. Had I met with my young self today, I would have shoved that light up his silly ass.
Yes, "Weres" as they called themselves--people who believed in nonsense like "M-Shifting" and "P-Shifting" and whatsuch gobshite. But I think I wanted to believe them. It would still be nice to believe that those things are possible. I know and admit---I did believe back then, that there could truly be werewolves in this world.
But there are straws, and they break the backs of camels. Oh yes, there came a straw. I met a young man, little over a year older than myself--Christian. He too wanted to change, to be different and free, for his own unique and tangled set of reasons. Our stories intertwined. But one day, Christian made a promise to someone to stop talking with me. In fact, out of fear of further alienating someone who offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Christian chose to stop talking with me.
He was not an especially adept conversationalist back then... that Chris. As much as I loved him, as much as I still do--he is easily swayed by a certain sense of inadequacy. He was afraid of betraying this new person's trust, and simultaneously, guilty of having already betrayed it--if only in his own mind. And now, the betrayal was twofold--for he had betrayed me, his one and only Were friend.
It could have been such a stupid, simple, silly thing. Some young man pretended he knew a ritual, or way, to become an animal. Perhaps it was even effective, in the sense of Wickenry, in that it would allow him to achieve a sense of spiritual connection with an inner animal. Regardless of my speculation however--the one certain affect of this ritual was the seperation it brought between us both.
It would be a seperation that would not hold long. No... maybe that was not what he desired, after all. Maybe that was not what either of us wanted.
Suffice to say, it is an old, buried time in my life, not needing to be further exhumed. But the point I must clarify--is that we did believe in werewolves--and overcame our youthful fantasies... no, perhaps we were forced to abandon them, by life and its expectations. Regardless, it's safe to say that I myself am sane, and in no way delude myself to the pre-existance of such beings. And it's this particular stipulation that kicked off my early highschool life.
With a shattered vision of the world, and a continued longing for transformation into a beastman, I determined to become a scientist--a biologist in fact, and later, as I discovered the term--a genetic engineer. Yes! If werewolves did not exist, I thought, at the age of seventeen--I would be the one who would enable them to!
So as my peers dreamed of things like becoming celebrities, or veterinarians, or athletes--I dreamed of creating a species, being a mad scientist--a sort of reverse Doctor Moreau. I embarassed myself quite often with this hidden desire, until I could do it in silence no more. I shared the desire with my best friends, and my mother.
Of course, it wasn't the sort of thing you could take seriously, even if you tried your hardest, and try they did, for they were good friends and family. Needless to say, I had the enthusiasm for biology--especially cellular and animal biology, batesian mimicry and respiration, hemotoxins and neurotoxins, clades and genuses and glycolysis, all terms jumbled and dancing about in my head. Fun and amazing trivia, intriguing notions. Yet I saw no way to turn this knowledge into anything resembling my fantasy, no matter how I strained my mind.
Even as I learned of cellular chimeras in my later years of highschool--of culturing zygotes with foreign cells interspersed--I realized the political landslide that would have to be climbed to even begin experiments centered on practical focuses, let alone my personal fantasy.
I opted out. The world was not there yet. It almost felt like I'd been born too soon, in a world that was constantly zoomed in on the moral dillema of exploiting a pinprick-sized mass of cells for medical purposes, simply because it consisted of the DNA of two people.
Yes, if stem-cell research was a taboo, what could you even call werewolf research?
So there was another reason to condemn myself as an abomination, and an outsider... a reprobate and sinner. Because politics would never allow my dream. No, it'd just be a joke. I laugh now, writing this, I really do sound like a mad scientist. The point of course, is that my desire stood out of my reach once again, unfulfillable--not only by the means of God, now, but by the means of Science.
So what was left? Well, there was always just being me--a boy who loves the thought of turning into something different, no matter how impossible that is. So during the period of my Graduation from High School, I shed my silly, youthful veneer of fantasy. Not the fantasy of changing, but the fantasy of creating a beast-person, as a career. It was probably a late development of practicality on average--I was now Nineteen. Nonetheless, I began to find ways to make do despite my lack of brilliance or persistance in the face of adversity.
The first of which was to masturbate and fantasize a whole lot more. The second was to explore what something called a furry was.
Yes, I'd heard the term before. Furries. The "Were" people had mixed feelings. I never really understood the term. Some of the less lucid weres had told me they were like werewolves, except standing on humanoid, plantigrade feet, and wearing clothing. Then the more cynical, scornful ones would call them "wannabes", pretenders to werewolfism.
But at this age, I had finally developed sober opinions about the Therianthropy subculture--ones of ridicule for their angst and melodrama. As it turned out, what a Furry actually was, was a human person, much like myself, who really liked... well, it turned out--the very sort of things I liked. A regular Bohemian Revolutionary of growing claws, fur, and fangs.
Or so I thought, as I paged through pictures of animal people on sites like TransFur and FurAffinity, some changed from humans, some not. I had yet to learn what a vast and myriad subculture this internet niche had in store. In truth, I learned in time that even amongst such people, I am rare--for not all furries desire to transform, or even find arousal in anthropomorphic animals (although at least, on the latter account, most do).
And I finally found my place amongst them, as a young man still very much preoccupied with change--no longer into the form of a wolf--but a fox.
There is much more yet to tell, but I fear I will have to leave that for another time... The longer I write, the more stuffy I seem to sound, even to myself. Perhaps it is the allergies. Perhaps not.